Noman's tek

Note:

This page is a transcription of Noman's Tek. The content is to remain accurate as such.

DMT for the Masses

… a mhrb extraction tek by Noman

An updated and edited reprint of the same-named article from The Entheogen Review, Autumnal Equinox 2006, Volume XV, Number 3, edited by noman and zhah March, 2007.

Disclaimer

First things first. Performing this procedure is illegal in most countries. I do not advocate performing it where illegal and I do not perform it myself where illegal.

The intent of this tek is to simplify the extraction procedure as much as possible and make it doable for the average person in the average kitchen in an evening. While I think that I have accomplished this, it does not mean that one does not have to do their homework. You should read a few teks before deciding on one and research the chemicals and procedures that you will be using. I don’t give instructions for decanting, siphoning, and filtering, for example, because I assume that you have educated yourself on these simple procedures and that I don’t have to clutter up my tek with them. You should treat this procedure as a starting point from which it is up to you to discover the best way to proceed based upon the materials and equipment available to you.

Okay, so onward to DMT for the Masses.

Have fun, be safe, and share your findings!

Materials

• Dust mask, safety goggles and rubber gloves
• Mimosa Hostilis root bark
• A coffee grinder or heavy duty blender (one that will crush ice)
• Mixing jar – this should be glass with a wide mouth and a tight fitting lid. A quart jar can do 50g of bark, a gallon pickle jar can do 200g.
• Water
• Lye (granulated NaOH)
• Vinegar (for neutralizing lye spills)
• Naptha – get VM+P and not lighter fluid
• Collection jars – 4 wide mouth 8 oz (250mL) jelly jars with lids
• Separating apparatus – a separatory funnel is easiest but siphoning and decanting will work fine.
• Coffee filters
• Rubber spatula
• Very cold freezer – should freeze ice cream HARD
• Non-sudsy ammonia – 10% solution, e.g. “janitorial strength” from Ace hardware, is optimal, but 5% “household strength” will do as well.
• Eye-dropper

Extraction Procedure

1. Pulverize the bark until it’s just fiber and pink/purple dust. It should be snapped into small pieces and run through a coffee grinder or blender at high speed. You may need pruning shears to cut the bark small enough to grind properly. It needs to be completely broken down. The dust created is very fine and astringent to the respiratory tract. Unless you dig big cakey purple boogers, wear a mask.
2. Mix 15mL water and 1g lye per gram of bark in the mixing jar. For example: 50g bark would require 750mL water and 50g lye. One level tablespoon of lye weighs about 15g, though this can vary considerably, better to use a scale. Note that lye is dangerous. Blind you forever dangerous. Wear eye protection and have a bottle of vinegar handy as a neutralizer and for clean up. Add the lye to the water slowly stirring constantly until completely dissolved.
3. Add the powdered bark, cap and shake the jar and let the bark soak for awhile. An hour or so.
4. Now add 1mL naptha per gram of bark in the mixing jar and turn the jar end over end. Do not shake or splash or there will be a tendency for the solution to form an emulsion. Simply roll the naptha around in the bark solution. Do this for one minute and then let the jar stand until the naptha has pretty much separated to the top.
   Repeat agitation three more times.
5. After the final agitation, separate the two layers. The naptha (top layer) goes in one of the collection jars, the rest stays in the mixing jar with the bark.
6. Put the collection jar in the freezer.
7. Repeat steps 4 to 6 three more times. Leave the last NP extraction in the jar for a day or two, agitating occasionally to pick up any strays.
8. Go to bed. You should have a collection of snow globes waiting for you in the morning.
9. Pour each jar of naptha out through a coffee filter. Save the naptha, which can be reused in the next batch or evaporated down producing a residue which can be further refined (see recrystallization below). A lot of paste will stick to the sides of the jar, so use a small rubber spatula to scrape the sides down onto the filter as well. Spread each filter out to dry. There will still be some residue in the jars, a bit of Salvia or MJ will scrub them out nicely.
10. Once the paste has dried THOROUGHLY (chop and stir it a couple of times), crush any lumps up and combine it all into one coffee filter. Now wash the lot by pouring freezer temperature NON-SUDSY ammonia over it and through the coffee filter. This will remove any remaining lye and some other impurities from the extract. If you can get 10% ammonia (“janitorial strength”) all the better. Most important, though, is NON-SUDSY: shake the bottle, if it suds, get a different bottle. It won’t take much, 100mL or so for a 200g batch, just make sure all the powder is thoroughly wetted, and stir it around while washing. A good bit of the mass will wash away (25–45%) but it’s nothing you want to be smoking anyway. (Note: if you intend to recrystallize, you can omit the ammonia wash).

You should be left with somewhere in the vicinity of 0.5% of the weight of the root-bark in DMT powder. It is perfectly smokable at this point, but it can be refined further by recrystallization. Although recrystallization inevitably results in loss of goods, once you’ve had a hit of DMT that left absolutely NOTHING behind in the pipe, you won’t want to use anything else.

Recrystallization

The idea behind recrystallization is that solvents generally hold more solute when hot than cold and that the solubility of different solutes varies differently with temperature. If a solvent with a lot of different solutes dissolved in it cools down slowly, the different solutes will precipitate individually. Naptha will work for this but heptane is better. Heptane is available as Bestine – a rubber cement remover.

Place a glass container with the DMT and a glass container of the recrystallization solvent together in a pan of hot water. Shot glasses in a saucepan work well for a gram or two. The fumes from whatever solvent you use will be extremely flammable, so don’t use a gas stove or light a bowl or be otherwise stupid. The DMT will already be melting if the water is hot enough. Add the hot solvent little by little (eye-dropper), agitating until all of the DMT is dissolved. Use as little solvent as possible. It should take only about 20–30mL of solvent per gram of powder. The solvent will be a clear yellow.

Leave the pan of water with the DMT container to cool to room temperature. Remove the DMT container and cool in the refrigerator, then the freezer. You will end up with DMT crystals of varying purity atop a pellet of slag which still contains quite a bit of DMT but also lye if you skipped the ammonia wash. Filter the solvent and separate the crystals from the slag. The crystals can be refined in one or two more recrystallizations into pure clear DMT if desired. The slag can also be further refined or simply redissolved into the next batch. The solvent can be reused or evaporated down and the residue scraped and cleaned.

And don’t forget to scrub those jars and utensils with your favorite smoking herb!

Remarks

According to Noman himself he was working on a revision that would include the following:

• "Get rid of that goddamn ammonia wash. My friend has never had trouble with it but it seems to cause problems for at least half the people that do it. I'll change it to a wash of the NP with a weak basic solution."
• "Note that if pre-powdered bark is being used, 1.5 - 2X of the water called for will be required."
• "Add that using heat for the last pull will increase yield. I left that out of the original for the sake of simplicity, but it probably should be mentioned."
• "Go into more detail about the freeze precip. When I wrote the tek, commonly available bark was of much higher quality. Now a partial evap is sometimes necessary to get the solution concentrated enough to precip."

Entropmancer advices the following to Noman: [3]

• "Noman, I have one suggestion regarding your tek. I think that calling for a bit less naphtha would make it so that peoples' extractions are concentrated enough to freeze-precip more often. (It may end up taking them one or two more pulls to get all the spice, but I think that easy freeze-precipitation is a good trade-off for one or two extra pulls).
  SWIM found that when using somewhere around 0.4 mL of naphtha per gram of bark (doing every pull with heated naphtha), every pull except the last one freeze-precipitated easily. (This was with an A/B in a sep funnel, but I don't see why it wouldn't work as well with an STB)"